Cigarette
by Asking foR lifE
Summary: They both smoke. It's funny.


This is my first venture into the Death Note portion of the ffdotnet waters. There is the possibility that this is so incredibly OOC that you'll want to tear your eyeballs out, because I have not read the manga, and I haven't so much as gotten halfway to the point where Matt and Mello even enter the series. Not like something like that would stop me from writing M&M slash, though. D:

Disclaimer: Oh, hay, look! 8D I don't own this fandom! How shocking.

* * *

Matt was smoking. Inhale, hold, release. That was nothing unusual; just a room filled with thick, addictive smoke, and Matt, who held the acrid stuff deep in his lungs until it _burnt._ Inhale, and wait. Wait for the frightening double skip of his heart. Exhale. It was such a common mistake that he let his tensions out with a Nintendo DS and the latest Legend of Zelda package, that on the late nights of the Kira case, sitting in front of those flickering screens and watching the pain, the _death_, the metallic _plink plink_ of a video game could be heard lingering just beneath the screams. It was not such a common mistake that he smoked for more than the chance to dangle a lit cigarette from between his lips and let the wind lift his hair. He smoked to kill. Himself? Maybe, but probably not. He felt he'd die at the hands of something much larger, which, for now, he watched and tried to find, somewhere, on the black security tapes and gruesome news footage.

He inhaled. Held it. Let it go.

Didn't quite answer promptly when he heard, "You're not even paying attention," from across the room.

Mello wasn't smoking. He might as well have been, taking surreptituous deep breaths of the grey tendrils which floated through the air to greet him. He thought Matt didn't notice that he never complained about the pack or two of Molboro Lights he went through each afternoon. Sometimes more, if he could. Light one, smoke it, and get another. What a cycle. Every now and again, it made Matt dizzy with the disease of it all.

"Neither are you," he said finally, rolling his fingertips over the fragile wrapping of his half finished smoke. It was smouldering now, while its flakes of ash descended to the dusty floorboards and made white stains on his dark jeans, and Matt pressed a hand into the creases to try and hide them.

The calm, clipped voice over of a reporter who was probably long since dead filled the immediate, natural silence. There was a lot of that kind of silence here. Just here. Matt looked over to see Mello fingering his rosary, clinking the chain and turning the cross over and over in his gloved palm. His bangs fell effectively over his face, purposeful, Matt knew, to keep people like him from reading Mello's open pages. They read one another too easily sometimes. It was a dangerous thing to do in this line of work.

Miss-something-or-other -- Matt never quite caught her name -- was cut off in the middle of a perfectly rehearsed dialogue, prepared to be delivered sans emotion, sans attachment, sans everything. Somewhat shakily, as Mello was always shaky on the _really_ late nights, Mello lifted his hand from the pause button on the fritzy moniter. He looked almost surprised at himself for turning the report off. Matt wasn't supposed to know that, so he shifted on the sagging loveseat, and took another drag. "Tired already?" he asked wryly, only because he was seven different kinds of tired and yet he wouldn't let himself stop.

Inhale.

"Yeah," Mello said sighed growled. Hold. "I don't know why the hell why."

Release. "Yeah," echoed Matt, and he snuffed his beloved cancer stick out on the armrest. The couch was riddled with tiny circular burn marks, like bullet holes which hadn't quite managed to penetrate all the way through the weary material, a bitter reminder of every sleepless night that someone with a cigarette had spent there. Matt's burn marks were concise, hidden by larger ones, rougher ones, and every here and there, the powdery burn marks that Mello left, the rare evenings when he would come up to Matt and snatch his cigarette right from between his lips and smoke it to oblivion. His face said he couldn't adjust to the taste, but his lips said that he was tired. Matt tossed the pack and his lighter with careless precision in Mello's direction, heard the soft slap of them landing concisely on his slim leather clad thighs, and the whirr of the lighter igniting another slender stick.

Sometimes, Matt would fall asleep on the job. Most of the time after that, he would wake up to the heartstopping sensation of ice steel pressed to the curve of his jaw, and Mello's war hardened eyes watching his every twitch beside him. He would have snuffed out his cigarette long ago, another memory in a disfigured photo album, and perhaps gathered a handful of sickeningly cheap chocolates to keep himself appeased whilst waiting for Matt's return to the living world. The mixed scent of two dollar candies and overpriced cigarettes made Matt's stomach turn in a cycle turned endless by the barrel of Mello's pistol nestled comfortably in the underside of his jaw. Always the tender skin, did Mello aim for. Where it was inevitable for the feeling to be completely unbearable.

And some times, Mello would be closer to Matt than others. There might be a subtle press of thighs together, or a haphazard scrape of gloved nails over the nape of Matt's neck, because if he let his frustrations out with video games, and Mello let them out by eating chocolate and shooting people, the truth was that the isolation was getting to him. More often than not, there was complete silence and utter submission. It was easy to turn a tide which didn't already know where it wanted to go. Matt on the bottom, Mello on top, the gun ruling them both. The pistol was always loaded, always cocked. One misplaced attempt to relieve stress, and the game was up for them both. Matt could handle dying, and sure as anything, Mello could live with giving death out; the threat of loss was what kept them going, and coming back for more.

Once, Mello had tried to kiss him. Spread his legs in a terrible way and pinned Matt down, face set and drawn and _hail Mary, full of grace_.

But Matt hadn't fallen asleep yet. He was smoking, Mello fingering his rosary.


End file.
